MATTHEW Conde tried to escape justice by fleeing home to the UK but he was returned to Portugal and sentenced for his part in the gruesome 13-day horror.

James Ross, pictured with his wife Donna, who was brutally tortured. (Photo: Internet)

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THE last of a gang of thugs who subjected a Scots dad to 13 days of gruesome Reservoir Dogs-style torture on the Algarve has been jailed for more than nine years.

Matthew Conde, 26, tried to cheat justice by fleeing home to the UK after Portuguese cops arrested his fellow torturers.

But he was caught and flown back to Portugal to be tried for his part in the kidnap and maiming of dad-of-two James Ross.

Ross was abducted by the gang in 2010 and held prisoner in a villa in a row over a drug debt.

His captors stripped him naked, chopped off his ear, two fingers and three toes, nailed his hands to a piece of wood and beat him with a baseball bat.

They also burned his eye and genitals with a cigarette lighter and crushed his private parts in a vice until he almost passed out.

The gang’s leader, Steven Johnson, of Manchester, believed Ross owed him money and had been working for a rival criminal group.

So the gang lured him to Portugal with the promise of a job, then maimed him for life. When they hacked off his ring finger, they told him: “This is for Donna” – a reference to his wife back home in Wick, Caithness.

Johnson planned to murder Ross by tying a weight to his body and dumping him in a reservoir but the plot failed when the gang’s car crashed on the way to the scene. Police then arrested some of the gang and Ross managed to escape.

In July last year, Johnson was jailed for 25 years – the longest sentence possible under Portuguese law – for attempted murder, kidnap, GBH and drug trafficking. Callum McLeod, 46, of Stornoway on Lewis, was sentenced to 15 years.

Terence McGurck, 34, and William Quinn, 55, both of Coventry, were jailed for eight years, and Ronald Lee Rose, 26, also of Coventry, got two-and-a-half years.

Conde, who has been described as Johnson’s right-hand man, escaped after his friends were arrested and went back to Britain. His lawyers claim he freed Ross before he left.

He was later held on an international arrest warrant and returned to the Algarve, before being tried and convicted of attempted murder and aggravated kidnapping.

Sentencing him on Monday, the court in Loule, near Faro, said it had not been proved that Conde actually tortured Ross.

But the judges added: “He kept prisoner for several days a person who had body parts missing, had been burnt with a cigarette lighter and was suffering terrible pain.”

Conde’s lawyers said he would appeal. Ross returned to Scotland after treatment.